Lessons from The Beautiful People

To some - crazy, others - genius
To his adversaries - possessed by demons, to his advocates - a god
An extremist to some, a much needed thorn in the side to others
To king him or kill him?
Dismissed and deified
Glorified and vilified
Friend of the sinners and enemy of the saints
Rebel or ruler?
Idolized and demonized
Condemn him or commend him?
Destroyer or creator?

It’s curious to me how such a considerable critic of Christianity can have so much in common with Christ. Not unlike Jesus, the religious establishment has demonized Marilyn Manson from the beginning, and not without valid reasons. But has it ever stopped to listen to him? To hear the cry of those he represents? If his fanbase isn’t the oppressed, the broken-hearted, the poor in spirit, the downtrodden, the hurting, then who is?

Like most of Ecclesiasties or the first half of a Psalm (before the typical redemptive ending), his lyrics cry out to a meaningless world and a god who seems absent and oblivious to our suffering. I want to look at some of the lyrics and see what we might learn.

“it's all relative to the size of your steeple” – Beautiful People

How often have we made Christianity into building our own empires bigger and bigger? The cooler we are the bigger our church. The bigger our church, the more God must love us. We seem to be under the distinct impression that there’s some sort of direct relationship between how much God is blessing us and how many people are coming to our church. But by that standard Jesus would make a sad sorry savior as his group of a mere 120 people (Acts 1:15) when he died was far from acceptable by our standards.

In fact, Jesus seems to have regularly invited people to walk away from what he was doing by making inflammatory remarks (eat my flesh), bucking the system (Pharisees and teachers), confusing people (parables), and not being ‘nice’ (“Get behind me Satan!”).

“Dear god if you were alive you know we'd kill you” - GodEatGod

We could make some obvious parallels to Jesus' life and death here, but what about God in general (the whole trinity, so to speak)? We may not have killed Him, but aren’t we often guilty of twisting him up into a little ball until he fits into our own little box. A place where we can control him and manipulate him to acquiesce to what we want. We tame the Lion of Judah until he becomes irrelevant, a fate worse than death.

How about this passage from C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe just before Lucy meets Aslan.

“Is — is he a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of the Beasts? Aslan is a lion — the Lion, the great Lion.”

“Ooh,” said Susan, “I thought he was a man. Is he — quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver, “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Let's look at another song from Manson,

"I want to fly into your sun
Need faith to make me numb
Live like a teenage christ
Im a saint, got a date with suicide

Oh Mary, Mary
To be this young is oh so scary
Mary, Mary
To be this young I'm oh so scared
I wanna live, I wanna love
But its a long hard road, out of hell
I wanna live, I wanna love
But its a long hard road, out of hell” – A Long Hard Road Out of Hell

I think this echoes how a lot of teens feel, I know it’s how I used to feel (and still do sometimes). Doing their best to live like a “teenage Christ” on the outside, but slowly bleeding to death on the inside, where few people take the time to look. I think we could do a lot more to give friendship and hope to all the teens that are deeply hurting, the type of teens that make up Manson’s fanbase, the type of teens that have generally been scorned out of (rather than loved into) our churches. This isn’t exclusive to teens of course but I think it’s the locus of our collective error as well as where we have the most opportunity to affect lives.